According to Agcom (2018d) (see Figure 1), almost the entire population accesses media to be informed, and over 80 per cent of citizens access information daily. Only 5 per cent of Italians are not informed at all, at least not through mass media.
Specific factors lead to the division of the population into groups with different kinds of information access, leading to the risk of media exclusion or marginalisation of certain segments of the population. In particular, low education and poor economic conditions appear to define the perimeter of social groups that risk marginalisation in the informational ecosystem.
The information diet of Italians is characterised by marked cross-media consumption, with more than three quarters of the Italian population consuming media this way.
Television is confirmed as the medium with the greatest informative value, both in terms of frequency of access for information purposes and for perceived importance and reliability. At the same time, the Internet is considered an important source of news, yet the perceived reliability of online information sources remains, on average, lower than that of traditional sources.
The ranking and frequency of access to media used to obtain information do not change when it comes to political news, with television and the Internet remaining the privileged sources. However, with regard to political information, citizens have a narrower consumption habit, which is less cross-media and hybrid compared with general information consumption.
The age group of users has an impact on whether they have a single-medium informative diet. Compared to other age groups (see Figure 2), the class of individuals aged 14–17 registers the largest share of subjects who do not get informed, at 12.6 per cent, compared with 5 per cent for the total population. An additional share of minors, about 10 per cent, accesses only one medium to get informed. This value is higher than that of all the other age groups, with the exception of people over 65, most of which, according to Audiweb data do not access the Internet.
Considering audience data and studies released during the Covid-19 pandemic, young people and especially minors accessed television and online newspapers more than ever during the total lockdown period (Gevers, 2020; ViacomCBS & MTV, 2020). Hence, we can probably say that older people are more likely to maintain a single-medium informative diet, compared with younger subjects.
When considering news outlets’ audiences, according to Agcom’s elaborations on Auditel data, Tg1 is still the most important evening news in Italy.[i] According to Audipress (2020), there were 15.759 million newspaper readers on an average day in the last trimester of 2019, with sports newspapers representing one-fifth of total reads. The four most-important quality newspapers (Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, La Stampa, and QN-Il Resto del Carlino) are read more than a million times on an average day (almost a third of the total quality newspapers reads). Looking at news websites, according to Comscore in November 2019, Citynewswas the leading publisher (a syndication including digital native news outlets active in the most important Italian cities, e.g., PalermoToday, QuiComo, PadovaOggi, IlPescara, CasertaNews, etc.), thanks to an online monthly audience of 26 million, followed by Fanpage (about 20 million) and TgCom24 (about 19 million). Looking at newspapers websites, Quotidiano.net (Il Resto del Carlino, Il Giorno e La Nazione), FattoQuotidiano.it (that is a news outlet different from the print newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, with a different managing director), and Corriere della Sera (which has recently introduced a metered paywall system on its website) are the best performers (each with more than 17 million monthly users).
[i] Even if, from September 2015 to September 2019, the audience of the evening news programme Tg1 (on air from 20:00 to 20:30 on RAI1) has decreased from 25.1 to 22 per cent of share, while the audience of evening news programme Tg5 (on air from 20:00 to 20:30 on Canale5) has increased from 17.4 to 18.2 per cent of share.
[1] We are obliged to underline that in Italy is still missing an unique web analytics system detecting all online news outlets (not every news outlet, in particular Citynews, is detected by Audiweb, and the same is for Comscore: in particular, some news outlets, including GEDI’s Repubblica, has not provided its products with the tags useful for the complete detection by Comscore).
[2] Citynews is a syndication including digital native news outlets active in the most important Italian cities (e.g. PalermoToday, QuiComo, PadovaOggi, IlPescara, CasertaNews, etc.).
